China Activates Historic Himalayan Link To Nepal

On 10 January 2018, China Telecom activated a long-awaited terrestrial link to the landlocked country of Nepal.  The new fiber optic connection, which traverses the Himalayan mountain range, alters a significant aspect of Nepal’s exclusive dependency on India, shifting the balance of power (at least for international connectivity) in favor of Kathmandu.

Following a number of brief trials since mid-November, Nepal Telecom fully activated Internet transit from China Telecom at 08:28 UTC on 10 January 2018, as depicted below.

Background

In our 2015 coverage of the earthquake that devastated Nepal, I wrote:

Nepal, as well as Bhutan, are both South Asian landlocked countries wedged between India and China that are dependent on India for a number of services including telecommunications. As a result, each country has been courting Chinese engagement that would provide a redundant source of Internet connectivity.

In December 2016, executives Ou Yan of China Telecom Global (CTG) and Lochan Lal Amatya of Nepal Telecom (pictured below) signed an agreement to route IP service through a new terrestrial cable running between Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: What the storage industry’s inevitable transition to the cloud means for your business

Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft made a relatively unheralded acquisition of a company named Avere Systems. Avere’s raison d’etre is enterprise storage. In their own words, “Avere Systems was created by file systems experts determined to reinvent storage by changing the way enterprises thought about and bought storage resources.” Ostensibly, Microsoft purchased this firm to add cloud-based storage capabilities to its ever-expanding portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here

On the ‘web: The Value of MANRS

Route leaks and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have been in the news a good deal over the last several years; but the average non-transit network operator might generally feel pretty helpless in the face of the onslaught. Perhaps you can buy a DDoS mitigation service or appliance, and deploy the ubiquitous firewall at the edge of your network, but there is not much else to be done, right? Or maybe wait on the Internet at large to “do something” about these problems by deploying some sort of BGP security. But will adopting a “secure edge,” and waiting for someone else to solve the problem, really help? @ECI

Sponsored Post: Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Stream, Scalyr, VividCortex, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL, Zohocorp

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Fun and Informative Events

  • Webinar: January 23, 11am GMT & again at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern. Continue reading

Monolith or Microservices: Which should you start with?

 

This is a guest Post by Jake Lumetta, Founder and CEO, ButterCMS, an API-first CMS. For more content like this, follow @ButterCMS on Twitter and subscribe to our blog.

Conventional wisdom for startups counsels starting with a monolith, but are there situations where you should start with microservices instead? Interviews with dozens of CTOs illuminated the key considerations when deciding whether to start with a monolith or microservices.

Challenging Conventional Wisdom

My good friend Darby Frey recently kicked off a greenfield project after assuming his new role as Sr. Platform Engineering Lead of Gamut. Despite starting out with monolith at his previous company Belly, he discovered that — in the right circumstances — starting with a monolith isn’t always the best way to go.

“As one does, I allowed much of my thinking in my early days [at my new company] to be influenced by my previous company,” Darby told me.

At Belly, Darby and his team broke down their monolith into a fairly large microservices architecture. They managed to get it to a good place, but only after months of trials and tribulations migrating to microservices.

With this experience fresh in his mind, he approached his new project Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: 6 steps to engage and manage a vendor who isn’t meeting your standards

During the sales process, every vendor sounds great. They have case studies, they have great-looking material, they talk like experts and everything is good. But nothing is as simple as it looks in the beginning.There are always additional challenges. The true test of a service provider, or any vendor, is how they respond to those changes and challenges. Do they put you, the customer, first or do they get slow and unresponsive? If you have a vendor who isn’t meeting your needs, but you’re locked into a contract that makes it cost-prohibitive to leave, these steps will help you reduce some of the friction in the relationship, while providing a better outcome for your company.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 6 steps to engage and manage a vendor who isn’t meeting your standards

During the sales process, every vendor sounds great. They have case studies, they have great-looking material, they talk like experts and everything is good. But nothing is as simple as it looks in the beginning.There are always additional challenges. The true test of a service provider, or any vendor, is how they respond to those changes and challenges. Do they put you, the customer, first or do they get slow and unresponsive? If you have a vendor who isn’t meeting your needs, but you’re locked into a contract that makes it cost-prohibitive to leave, these steps will help you reduce some of the friction in the relationship, while providing a better outcome for your company.To read this article in full, please click here

AT&T’s Rupesh Chokshi on NFV/SDN-enabled Business Networking

Rupesh Chokshi AT&T has been aggressively transforming its core network with software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), gaining the ability to offer on-site infrastructure to enterprises in an innovative, simplified, and easy to consume model. The resulting platform, AT&T FlexWareSM, provides best-in-class, virtualized network functions to businesses across the entire spectrum of the market. From... Read more →

Samsung Puts the Crunch on Emerging HBM2 Market

The memory market can be a volatile one, swinging from tight availability and high prices one year to plenty of inventory and falling prices a couple of years later. The fortunes of vendors can similarly swing with the market changes, with Samsung recently displacing Intel at the top of the semiconductor space as a shortage in the market drove up prices and, with it, the company’s revenues.

High performance and high-speed memory is only going to grow in demand in the HPC and supercomputing arena with the rise of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and graphics processing, and …

Samsung Puts the Crunch on Emerging HBM2 Market was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

MP on Vertitech IT’s “Best IT Blogs 2018”

This is a quick post to say thanks to the folks at Vertitech IT for listing movingpackets.net among their Best IT Blogs for 2018 (“Must-Read Resources for CIOs, IT & Security Pros”). MP was on the Best IP Blogs of 2017 as well, and it’s an honor to be on the list for a second year.

Vertitech IT Best Blogs of 2018

Vertitech explain the creation of this list thus:

Information Technology.  Sometimes we get so focused on the bits and bytes side of the equation we forget about the information part.  When it comes right down to it, IT is all about using technology to inform, to communicate, to make the business of doing business easier and more understandable.

That’s why we compiled this list. Originally created last year with 50 top IT blogs, we’ve expanded this year’s update to include 70 leading resources for IT professionals, including blogs, discussion forums, niche industry publications, and the best resources for CIOs and CTOs.  VertitechIT’s top 70 IT blogs, forums, and resources were selected because they are among the most current, frequently updated, credible, and informative sources of information related to IT on the web today. From musings of industry leaders, to the Continue reading

Configuration errors in Intel workstations being labeled a security hole

Security researchers at an antivirus company have documented another potentially serious security hole in an Intel product, this time in the mechanism for performing system updates. The good news, however, is that it is limited to desktops, is a configuration error, and does not appear to impact servers.Last June, researchers at F-Secure found a flaw in Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), a feature used to perform remote updates to advanced desktops using Intel vPro or workstation platforms using Core desktop chips and certain Xeon CPUs. Xeon is primarily a server processor but there are some low-end chips used in high-performance workstations, such as those used in a CAD environment.To read this article in full, please click here

Configuration errors in Intel workstations being labeled a security hole

Security researchers at an antivirus company have documented another potentially serious security hole in an Intel product, this time in the mechanism for performing system updates. The good news, however, is that it is limited to desktops, is a configuration error, and does not appear to impact servers.Last June, researchers at F-Secure found a flaw in Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), a feature used to perform remote updates to advanced desktops using Intel vPro or workstation platforms using Core desktop chips and certain Xeon CPUs. Xeon is primarily a server processor but there are some low-end chips used in high-performance workstations, such as those used in a CAD environment.To read this article in full, please click here

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